I’ve won awards – just don’t ask which ones

Rob Long thinks he's a very good screenwriter. Now if only he could find the right award to reflect that.

‘I am an Arcony Award-winning screenwriter,” a screenwriter friend once announced to me, followed quickly by this admission: “There is no such thing as an Arcony Award.”

He had, he told me, designed a rather elaborate trophy on his computer, sent the specifications to a certain website, and six weeks later received his very own – and very fake – Arcony Award.

He put it on the top shelf of his office bookcase – “Nobody ever asks to look at it closely” – and began listing the award in his official biography, and referring to himself in publicity materials as an “award-winning screenwriter”.

“I may,” he told me, “award myself another one this year. I think two will look more impressive on the shelf.”

Which they will. Awards are like expensive chocolates – one is good but two are better and three, if you’ve got the gall, are best of all. It doesn’t occur to anyone in Hollywood to ask which award, specifically, my friend has won. And even if it did, it wouldn’t occur to them to go any deeper. People in Hollywood aren’t that curious about the details surrounding an award. They just like shiny trophies.

On Sunday night the Hollywood Foreign Press Association – a rather mysterious group that numbers, some say, in the low nineties – will present the 72nd Annual Golden Globe Awards to the top people in the film and television business. (Well, almost the top: I won’t be there this year.)

They’ll hand out shiny trophies to the actors, directors, writers, and producers of film and television projects this year, and it won’t occur to anyone – and if it does, it will be quickly squashed – to ask, What is the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, anyway?

The HFPA has always had a dicey reputation. Despite its longevity – or maybe because of its longevity – it’s never been entirely clear who belongs to the organisation. Officially, it’s a trade group consisting of “international” – meaning: non-American – journalists and photographers who cover Hollywood for the international press. But for a long time, the rumour was, its ranks were filled by about six Serbian tabloid reporters and one paparazzo photographer from Senegal, none of whom had any money, and all of whom were interested in figuring out how to get invitations to swanky movie premières and special screenings, along with the gifts and trinkets that every studio and network bestows on journalists.

And they bestow these things for a reason, of course. People in the entertainment business don’t give gifts, or awards, without strings attached. For years – for most of the existence of the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, as a matter of fact – the agreement that undergirded all of the gifts and freebies and luxurious catering doled out by the big studios and networks was: if you eat our food and take our gifts, you’re obliged to write nice things.

And until very recently, the Hollywood Foreign Press Association happily obeyed. Awards were bought. Winners were notified in advance – often with the implicit threat that if they didn’t show up to receive the award, it would go to whoever did. The whole enterprise was so splendidly and gleefully corrupt it’s hard to imagine that the squat little trophy – a small pedestal supporting a globe the size of a tennis ball – had any meaning at all.

In Hollywood, though, the longer you hang around the more respectable you get. When Sunday night’s ceremony opens – 72 years after the first shabby and corrupt Golden Globe Awards – it will be another indication that the Hollywood Foreign Press Association has gone legit. All of Hollywood will be in attendance – willingly this time, no threats necessary – and when the winners’ names are called, they’ll have genuinely delighted and surprised looks on their faces.

We still may have only a vague idea who or what the Hollywood Foreign Press is, but we’ll all have to admit that whatever a Golden Globe really means, we all want one. All of us who work in the entertainment business have plenty of empty shelf space. There’s not one of us who doesn’t think to himself: “You know, I deserve a couple of shiny trophies.”

“Maybe I should design an award for myself,” I told my friend. “I could use a little extra glitter on my CV.”

“Yes!” he shouted. “Do it! But don’t design your own. Just give yourself an Arcony Award. It’ll be much more impressive if there’s another recipient. I’ll order one for you.”

“Order two,” I said. “I mean, I’m really quite good.”

He nodded. “Do you think,” he asked, “we should get a few more to give out to our friends?”

“Give?” I asked. “How about sell?”

He smiled and nodded. In 20 or 30 years, I predict, the Arcony Awards will go from being a fraudulent and fictitious nothing to being prestigious and sought-after. I mean, it’s happened before.

Rob Long is a writer and producer based in Hollywood

On Twitter: @rcbl